Now ERP and other new systems have allowed them to capture the data at a very granular level, but they haven't yet made the investment in the tools to roll that up and really be able to look -- at anything near real time -- at their profits by product, by market, by channel.

Is it always worth the effort to do that fine-grained real-time analysis? It's really a green-field opportunity, where little investments have huge returns. I've not seen, in 17 years of pricing projects, a project that has died for lack of ROI. These things can pay for themselves in weeks.

But can the project die for other reasons? If your culture is built around market share, where you say you want to charge a good price but not lose a single customer, you are kind of stillborn from a pricing standpoint.

It may be healthier for a company to lose some bad customers. But that can be a cultural bottleneck.

What advice do you offer companies trying to overhaul pricing practices and systems? Companies are terrified of jerking around their salespeople, and frankly, that concern is overrated. If you give them clear data and clear incentives, it's remarkable how fast it can happen. These guys are very adaptive.